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BBC ‘RECEIVES 18,000 COMPLAINTS OVER N-WORD’: Darren Boyle (Daily Mail 8/7) noted that the BBC had received 18,000 complaints over a report about a hit and run accident on July 29 in which presenter Fiona Lamdin had used the n-word in a quote attributed to the perpetrators of the accident, who were believed to have been racially-motivated. Mr Boyle said the report had run on local south-west  services and the national BBC News Channel, though it had since been removed. He added that by comparison, a report by Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis in which she had attacked Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings had received 23,674 complaints.  Mr Boyle said that Ofcom guidance on the use of the word was that it was ‘highly unacceptable’ at all times, but could be used when ‘strong contextualisation is required’.

BBC ‘PUSHES WHITE PRIVILEGE’ IN EDUCATION VIDEO: Jack Montgomery (Breitbart London 5/8) reported  that a video advocating that ‘white privilege’ meant that ‘your skin colour had not been the cause of your hardship or suffering’ was being pushed by BBC Bitesize, which provides lessons for British schools. He said the film had been made by former basketball player John Amaechi.

Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 6/8) observed that the item was receiving considerable criticism and posted a selection of tweets:

Patrick O’Flynn: BBC indoctrinating school kids with guilt complexes and cultural Marxist BS is one thing that really pushes my buttons. Simply unacceptable from an organisation that levies a compulsory subscription fee. On reflection, the most insidious aspect of this (which I tweeted an initial reaction to last night) is the BBC’s use of the term “explain” to describe an eminently contestable analysis. That kids are led to believe these are established truths and cannot be contested is awful.

Dr Chris Newton: Radical left wing propaganda for kids funded by the BBC license fee payer. And the Tories, with an 80-seat majority, just stand by and let this one-sided indoctrination happen. Unacceptable. Unforgivable.

Calvin Robinson: The BBC is obliged by its charter to “bring people together… and help contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the UK”. Instead, they are producing divisive material and fanning the flames of racial unrest. All while wanting a “greater role in children’s education”.

Ian Leslie: OK, but isn’t the more important question whether the BBC should be treating a tenuous and contested concept as if it’s neutral scientific knowledge? There are people who aren’t well versed in social theory? Shocking. But surely whether it’s a good explanation or not, it’s a political term adopted by a particular cohort & the BBC should contextualise it as such.

Frances Smith: Total nonsense. People are all born with an array of advantages and disadvantages, what this does is elevate skin colour above all others, and talk as if it were all that mattered. No wonder it annoys so many people. BBC shouldn’t mainstream such easily contested theories.

Karen Harradine: The poverty stricken, mainly white communities of the Rhondda Valleys don’t epitomise ‘white privilege’, a nasty concept riddled with conceptual holes. Why is the BBC race baiting again? And why are we forced to pay for it?

Madeline Grant: I’m old enough to remember when BBC bitesize was good for French vocab tests and GCSE history flash cards.

Darren Grimes: My two brothers, younger than I am are the grandsons of a miner, both without their father, both unemployed after attending rubbish state comprehensives and I’m supposed to believe they’re somehow privileged? The fact this is pushed by the BBC’s revision resources is dangerous. With BBC videos for children on white privilege, podcasts on ‘Karens’ and now the hounding of pensioners as the one group that they know are more likely to rely on their television set to combat loneliness, the BBC seems to be begging the government to act.

Jane Kelly: Why is the BBC asking this fatuous, racist question?

Tim Montgomerie: There are few bigger drivers of social justice than a stable family; especially built around marriage. Where’s the BBC video promoting that or the politicians arguing that? Belief in family isn’t fashionable but kids with two loving, committed parents have won life’s lottery.

Dr Rakib Ehsan: “Your skin colour has not been the cause of your hardship and suffering”. Try explaining this to underaged white girls who fell victim to cases of large-scale child sexual abuse. Cases fundamentally mismanaged by public authorities which were looking to “protect” race relations.

Laurence Fox: Anyone who choses colour of skin over content of character as a way of defining people, is a racist and racism should be stood up to wherever it rears its ugly head, however pretty a bow it’s wrapped up in.

Martin Daubney: That’s why the BBC has no place in education. Their “white privilege” propaganda actively suppresses those who are in the most need of help. It chokes policy & strangles hope. It actively divides our country. Rant over.

ZUBY: If BBC Bitesize have the cojones, I’d love to make a counter video for them explaining why ‘white privilege’ is a divisive, myopic, offensive and potentially dangerous idea that we shouldn’t be perpetuating. Let’s get both sides.

‘BASIC SCIENCE BEYOND BBC’: Jeff O’Leary (The Conservative Woman 7/8), argued  that it was difficult to see how the BBC could get its reports of the Beirut explosion disaster so wrong. First noting that reports had said the amount of explosive varied between 2,500 and 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, eventually settling on 2,700 tons,  Mr O’Leary suggested that this smacked of ‘take a middle figure as a safe bet’ approach. He then said that science correspondent David Shukman – who he noted did not have a science degree – had claimed the orange colour of the explosion was due to the ammonium nitrate itself, when it had in fact been caused by nitrogen dioxide, a by-product of the explosive reaction.

BBC MURDOCH PROGRAMMES ‘DOMINATED BY BILE’:  Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie (£ Spectator 7/8) argued that The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, the BBC’s three-part series about Rupert Murdoch transmitted in July, was dominated by ‘bile’ and contributions by three  of the ‘usual suspects’ – Tom Watson, Hugh Grant and Max Moseley – who each dispensed it. He added that, by contrast,  a long contribution from Trevor Kavanagh, the former political editor of the Sun, had ended up on the cutting room floor, presumably because he had been ‘warm and supportive’ (of Murdoch).  Mr MacKenzie said:

‘But to paint Rupert as a Logan Roy is ridiculous. Anybody who has worked closely with him will tell you his enthusiasms, his warmth and his never-ending drive make him fun to be around and exhausting. If you are a shareholder, you want a Rupert Murdoch to run your business. Always on. Always thinking. Always plotting. Literally 18 hours a day, seven days a week. And as a 12 per cent shareholder but with a voting right of three times that, always aligned to making you and him wealthier.’

BBC ‘FACES PENSIONER REVOLT’:  Paul Revoir (Daily Mail 5/8) said that the Age UK  charity had warned that the 10-page letter sent out to the over-75s to explain the new licence fee arrangements was too ‘long and complex’ and failed to make clear when the elderly would get a demand for payment. Mr Revoir reported that Age UK director Caroline Abrahams had warned that some of the recipients would be determined not to pay for a licence ‘come what may’. He said that the community organisation Silver Voices was urging all over-60s to cancel their direct debit payments and instead to send monthly, backdated cheques to TV Licensing, thereby causing administrative chaos but keeping within the law.  A group spokesman had said:

‘It defies belief that, as a second wave of coronavirus marches over the horizon, the BBC are doing this. It shows a lack of compassion, a lack of empathy, a lack of understanding.’

Mr Revoir said the BBC had said they had hired 800 additional staff to deal with queries from the over-75s and had received 300,000 calls on the matter since March.

BBC OVER-75s ‘FACE CYBERTHREAT’: David Snelling (Express 5/8) said that over-75s who were now having to pay for their television licences were facing a threat from cyber criminals, who were trying to steal their personal data by tricking them. He added that a common scam was the use of a text message which claimed to be an offer of a free year of television viewing. Mr Snelling said that the offer would be ‘hugely tempting’ because of the anger generated by the imposition of the new charge. He quoted a cybersecurity expert, who said that such messages looked convincing and were designed to make vulnerable victims act quickly.

BBC ‘SPREADS RECKLESS RUMOURS’ ABOUT BEIRUT ATTACK: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 5/4) noted that Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen had filed a report saying that there were ‘theories’ that an Israeli attack had caused the huge explosion in Beirut on the evening of August 4. Mr Byers noted that the BBC’s ‘specialist disinformation and social media correspondent’ Marianna Spring had already warned that such reports were ‘unfounded’ and risked spreading misinformation. Mr Byers added:

‘Both Hezbollah and Israel have ruled it out as an Israeli attack and the Israel government has offered to help Lebanon recover from this terrible catastrophe. Why on earth would he (Jeremy Bowen) spread rumours of an Israeli attack? Isn’t that astonishingly reckless and irresponsible from the BBC’s Middle East editor so soon after a devastating event?’

MEDIA COVERAGE OF PANDEMIC ‘IS RETRIBUTION FOR BREXIT’: Tim Black (Spiked! 4/8) argued that the media establishment, including the BBC, had generated ‘a barrage of fearmongering’ about the dangers of Covid-19 and seemed to be almost revelling in the pandemic, as if high death tolls, raising infection rates and R numbers were political points to be scored against the ‘Brexity Tory government’. He said:

“That is partially why the dominant media narrative has been so unremittingly doom-laden. It is a form of vengeance for members of an embittered media class. Retribution for the sins of Brexit. Punishment for electing the dastardly Tories. And so, Covid-related death tolls have become a daily incantation. Graphs, always curving ominously, have been tweeted hourly. And always with a sort of grim sense of vindication. No context is offered. No attempt to situate Covid in among the many other causes of death, globally and nationally, is made. There is never any admission that, say, tuberculosis, a disease for which there is treatment and a vaccine, will kill more people around the world this year than Covid. Never any willingness to admit that this nasty virus is just that — a nasty virus, and not the end of the world.”.

DEFUND THE BBC GROUP ‘LAUNCHES AGGRESSIVE AD CAMPAIGN’:  Guido Fawkes (3/8) reported that the Defund the BBC group had launched a ‘provocative’ mobile billboard campaign across the North-west of England  urging followers to cancel their TV licences to support the oiver-75s, who from Saturday (1/8) now had to buy a licence fee.  The article said sites for the posters included Salford Quays (outside the BBC’s northern HQ), Oldham and Rochdale. It also noted that Ofcom had last week published a report about audience attitudes to the media and had found there was a ‘moral dislike’ of the BBC and its licence fee among ‘the working class’.

TONY PARSONS: BBC ‘DOESN”T LIKE OUR COUNTRY’:  Author and commentator Tony Parsons (The Sun on Sunday 2/8) claimed that the BBC’s decision to scrap the free TV licence for the over-75s was ‘a kick in the head’ for those ‘who have borne the brunt of this health emergency’. He asserted:

“This was the year for the BBC to reach out to its most loyal viewers. This was a chance for the BBC to restore its diminished, degraded reputation and to start acting like the voice of the nation. And Auntie blew it. The BBC is now pathetically disconnected from the nation it is meant to represent.”

Citing recent attacks on the reputation of Winston Churchill, Mr Parsons commented that, ‘increasingly, our national broadcaster acts as though it doesn’t like our country’. He added that the BBC ‘will never tell you that the British abolished the slave trade before any other nation on earth, and that no Empire in human history was ever dismantled so peacefully, or was so willing to offer its former subjects a home.’ He continued, ‘As the BBC constantly flaunts its own political agenda, the case for the licence fee collapses.’

BBC TV LICENSING WEBSITE CRASH ‘A FARCE’: The Sunday Times (2/8) and the Mail (2/7) called yesterday’s crash of the TV Licensing website, on the first day of the re-introduced charge for over-75s, ‘a farce’. Rosamund Unwin of the Sunday Times reported that viewers trying to pay were greeted with a message that said the service was “temporarily unavailable while we update it for the changes to over-75 licences”, before the site was restored last night. The BBC had said: “To make the 75+ Plan available for customers online, the TV Licensing website was temporarily offline on Saturday, as was always planned.”

The Sunday Times (2/8) also reported that pensioners were being asked to provide their bank statements to the TV Licensing office to prove that they were in receipt of pension credit, and therefore still eligible for a free licence, It was said that this was raising concerns that the elderly would be at a risk of identity theft and fraud. It was further reported that the BBC had responded:

“TV Licensing are not actively seeking bank statements — this is simply an option and we don’t expect to make very much use of it. The TV Licensing team take extreme care with personal data and have a wide range of measures in place to protect it.”

ENDING OF OVER-75s FREE TV LICENCE ‘WAS GOVERNMENT DECISION’:   Katie Harris (Express 2/8), noting that the provision of free BBC TV licences to the over-75s had ended, quoted a BBC spokeswoman saying that it had been the government’s decision rather than the Corporation’s. Ms Harris said the axing of the free licences had happened on the day that a new director of BBC Scotland on a six-figure salary had been appointed. Expressions of concern about the appointment from pensioners affected by the new fee regime were included in the article.  One commented:

“They can’t afford free licences for over 75s but can afford to pay a six-figure salary to him and he becomes one of the very very many on six-figure salary at the BBC the BBC should be cutting back on these high earners.”

BBC PROVIDES ‘DISGUSTINGLY UNBALANCED’ MATERIAL FOR CHILDREN: Craig Byers (Is the BBC Biased? 1/8), noting that BBC director of radio and education – the former Labour minister James Purnell –  had said he wanted to give the BBC a bigger role in educating children, said he was analysing a range of material on the current BBC Bitesize GCSE pages. His first analysis focused on the BBC MIddle East history pages, and noted that the entire focus was on Israel and Palestine. Mr Byers observed that the list of contributors was ‘astonishingly biased’ because ‘not one of the seven Middle East class clips strays from the BBC’s left-of-centre, Israel-slamming narrative’.  He concluded:

“And is this disgustingly unbalanced material typical of the BBC’s educational output? Especially in an age of reviving antisemitism, I think we urgently need to know.”

BBC AXES AFTERNOON NEWSROUND AFTER 48 YEARS: Joe Kasper (Sun 29/7) said the BBC was axing its afternoon live television edition of the children’s news service Newsround – shown currently on kids’ service CBBC , but formerly on BBC One – after almost 50 years. Mr Kasper reported that the BBC wanted to transfer more of its children’s content online – and now had Ofcom’s permission to do so – because they were watching increasingly less live television. He added  that despite the lockdown, audiences for the Newsround bulletin had fallen from 37,000 children aged between 6-12 in 2019 to 24,000 in May this year. Mr Kasper noted that Ofcom had earlier warned that if audiences did not engage with the BBC, support for the licence fee could be eroded, and had now said it made sense for more children’s content to be provided online. It had also decided to impose safeguards to ensure the quality of programmes on CBBC was maintained while allowing the amount of news content on the live television channels to be reduced from 85 to 35 hours a year.

BBC ‘SEEMS SWEPT UP IN AN EMOTIONAL TIDE’:  Former Guardian political editor Michael White tweeted (28/7), ‘. . . .Lots of anti-racist talk on BBC Radio 4’s Today (again) today, much of it muddled, conventional thinking (again). It’s an important issue, but BBC seems swept up in an emotional tide. I switched to R3 where there are no complaints (yet) that music is too dominated by dead white Germans.’

THE BBC’S BROADCASTING MONOPOLY: At The Mallard website (28/7), Serena Lit argued that the BBC is essentially a ‘broadcasting monopoly’ with a ‘stranglehold’ on the industry, saying that the Corporation uses its size and licence fee funding to win advantage against commercial rivals. Where they have to earn their income from adverting the BBC ‘only advertises its own projects across the entire network’.

‘For decades’, she wrote, ‘the BBC has been failing to uphold its charter obligation to provide original services by choosing to create outlets and produce content remarkably similar to what is already being provided by the commercial sector’, and she wondered if top-rated BBC shows would have proven able to compete with Netflix or Apple ‘without help from the licence fee and the BBC’s free in-house advertising’.

‘The bulk of BBC iPlayer’s traffic is a direct result of the licence fee’, she stated. ‘Given we are all obligated to fork out £157.50 a year for it, many feel (understandably) compelled to get their money’s worth. Consequently, we have no meaningful indication of how popular the BBC and its content actually are with the British public’.

BBC’S ‘CHURCHILL TRASHING’ POLL LAUNCHED: Kathy Gyngell (Conservative Woman 29/7) argued that recent BBC reports about Winston Churchill, in which he was said to have caused the death through famine of three million people in the Bengal Famine of 1943,  felt like dangerous ‘dog-whistling’ to appease the most ignorant and aggressive end of the so-called anti-racist movement, and she invited readers to vote on the question “Is it time to stop calling Churchill a racist?’. Kathy asked:

‘Is trashing Churchill’s reputation deliberately fuelling the fires of division and prejudice? Is it time to stop denigrating the man who courageously led the West’s battle for freedom against the unspeakable evil of the Nazis?  We want to know what you think.’

SKY ARTS ‘TO FILL GAP LEFT BY BBC CUTS’: Luke May (Daily Mail 28/7) reported that satellite broadcaster Sky had decided make its dedicated arts channel available from September on the Freeview platform with no extra charge because cuts on the BBC Four television channel meant there was an important gap to fill. Mr May said that the BBC had cut the budget for BBC Four because it had decided to focus instead on a more youth-focused service on BBC Three. He added that Sky had also announced a raft of new commissions for the arts channel, including Landmark, designed to bring communities together to create the next ‘great British landmark’, as well as a programme about the playwright Harold Pinter. It would also be offering a series of arts bursaries.

BBC CHURCHILL REPORT ‘WAS OUTRAGEOUS CALUMNY’:  Henry Getley (Conservative Woman 28/7), analysing further a BBC news report which posited that Winston Churchill had killed three million Indians by triggering the 1943 Bengal famine, asserted that  to ‘anyone with the slightest knowledge of history and an ounce of humanity and common sense, the BBC’s outrageous calumny beggars belief’. Mr Getley, noting that ‘ironically’ a 2002 BBC poll – responded to by 1.6m viewers – had found Churchill the greatest Briton ever, also argued that in siding with the mobs who had defaced Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, the BBC had sold its soul to Left-wing creeds of progressiveness, virtue-signalling, identity politics, diversity, race, gender and man-made climate change’.